Goldhawk Interactivehttp://www.goldhawkinteractive.com
Creators of XenonautsTue, 21 Oct 2014 11:08:23 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.0JUN 17 2014 – Xenonauts Released!http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/2014/06/jun-17-2014-xenonauts-released/
http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/2014/06/jun-17-2014-xenonauts-released/#commentsTue, 17 Jun 2014 16:47:51 +0000http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/?p=808Release day has finally arrived: Xenonauts has left Steam Early Access and made its way into big wide world! Development has taken five eventful years. I still remember taking our first pre-orders and the days of being banned from Paypal. Our successful $150,000 Kickstarter was two full years ago now, and *that* day when Firaxis announced XCOM: Enemy Unknown was even longer back.

This process has taken a lot longer than anyone expected it to, myself included. I originally estimated that it would take 6 months and $25,000 to make Xenonauts. It took ten times that long and…well, I’ve not sat down and totted up all the production costs yet, but I already know they are an order of magnitude higher than my original estimates. If you were one of the really early backers: I’m sorry that you had to wait so long.

At the same time, this game would never have happened if it were not for those early backers. It also would not have happened were it not for the people who backed us during our Kickstarter, or those who bought the game when it came out on Steam Early Access. That money has all been spent on development; all of it has been spent on making Xenonauts the game you’re playing now. If you bought the game at any point before it formally released, know that your money *did* help us.

I should also mention the team that worked on the game. Our successful Kickstarter let us get an office and form a core of full-time individuals that make up the heart of the company, but literally hundreds of people have worked on Xenonauts in some capacity. Many of these people accepted lower rates than they would normally charge for their work because they wanted to be involved – they were doing this for the love, not the money. They have my thanks for doing so.

Going forwards, we will not be making further gameplay changes for a while (although I won’t rule out a patch V1.1 at some point in the future). However, we will continue to patch any crashes or game-breaking bugs found in the game. If you find any, please let us know on our forums and we’ll do our best to sort them out.

Our more immediate plans are to add Steam Workshop support to the game – we have a busy modding / mapping community on our forums and I’m keen to help them reach a wider audience and make the mod-install process as easy as possible. We’re also working on getting Mac / Linux builds set up on Steam and finally processing the physical Kickstarter rewards. Still work to do, then – but it’s tidying up stuff around the game, rather than work on the game itself.

To end, a few mind-boggling community figures: Steam has logged well over 1 million hours of gameplay on Xenonauts in the last year alone. That’s over a century spent in-game. Prior to release, the *average* player had put 45 hours into the game each (taken from everyone who ever fired up the game on Steam). Not bad, eh? I hope you enjoy finally getting your hands on the game!

PS – I should also mention that OpenXcom has also hit V1.0. They are a free, open-source clone of the original X-Com with none of the bugs and proper support for modern PCs. If you’re hunkering to play the original X-Com again, make sure you check these guys out!

This blog was originally set up the provide more information on the business side of development on Xenonauts, while the blog on Xenonauts was meant to be far more sales-centred. In reality, the content was largely duplicated and the traffic on the Xenonauts site was much higher so the interesting stuff went up on there instead. As we’re already rather busy with development, it’s difficult enough to keep one development blog up to date – let alone two.

Therefore we’re shuttering this blog for the time being, and all Xenonauts-centred news will be coming out on Xenonauts.com. This blog may spring back to life in some kind of post-Xenonauts future, but certainly not for the next few months.

]]>http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/2012/05/goldhawk-blog-hiatus/feed/0The Year Aheadhttp://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/2011/12/the-year-ahead/
http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/2011/12/the-year-ahead/#commentsFri, 23 Dec 2011 11:06:38 +0000http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/?p=773Merry Christmas, everybody, and a happy New Year! 2011 has come to a close, and 2012 is just beginning. We’re currently winding down for the festive break, but we’ll be back in less than a week!

It’s been a long year, and I thought the best way to open this article would be to show everyone just how far we’ve come! You can download a build of the game from the 6th of January this year here – it’s only about 25 mb. This is the earliest build of the game that’s ever been released, as even Build V1 (the very first pre-order build released) came out a month later on February 6th. Have a play for a few minutes, and hopefully it’ll illustrate the progress we’ve made. Yes, that’s right – there’s no air combat or ground combat in the game. Hell, the Aircraft Equip screen hadn’t even been coded then!

So even if progress can seem glacial at times, Xenonauts has actually been rattling along at a rapid rate of knots and we will continue to do so. It is worth remembering the rest of the team here at Goldhawk at this point – while I’m the most visible part of the company, there are numerous team members who have been working just as tirelessly on this game, often for minimal pay. The game wouldn’t have come this far if it wasn’t for them, so I want to thank them for their efforts. Thanks, guys.

We are hoping to release the game in 2012. The release date of the game has been continually slipping since the project was announced, but given the progress made in 2011 then I think a 2012 release is perfectly realistic. There’s a few things we are working on right now that should kick in in January that will substantially improve the game, which are:

1) Animation / Rendering: Thanks to Dan, our resident animator, we have animated up all of the Xenonaut soldiers with all of the in-game weapons, and about half the alien races too. We’ll probably have all the animations done in the next two months. However, the problem with all this is the sheer number of frames of animation that need to be rendered (over a million). We were looking at render farms who could do this for us, but they’re quite pricey – I actually think the easiest and most cost effective solution would be to buy 2-3 refurbished ex-corporate servers and rig them together to form a render farm that will blow through the renders in a couple of months. We can do this for less than $500 and I plan to start as soon as the New Year comes. Animation shouldn’t be an issue for us in 2012, unlike in 2011.

2) Alien AI: The last untamed frontier in programming terms is the alien AI – everything else is on someone’s “to-code” list. Xenonauts calls for an AI model where the aliens make intelligent use of the battlefield, fulfil mission objectives and use different tactics depending on what alien race is taking part in the battle. We started looking for an AI coder about a week ago and we have some promising leads which we’re following up. Coupled with the render farm mentioned above, we’re hoping to see a dramatic increase in the number of alien races in the current build of the game in the next couple of months. It should also allow us to put the long-awaited friendly NPC soldiers in the game too (also already animated).

3) Terrain Tiles: The biggest barrier to finishing Xenonauts remains the terrain tiles, which are the unfortunate combination of being technically demanding, visually challenging and hideously expensive. Nevertheless, we are pushing forwards. One of the major issues we’ve experienced so far is that the ground tiles in the game don’t look very nice – they’re single repeating tiles, so they can’t have much detail on them. We’ve just hired an artist to try doing the tiles in larger numbers, like 10×10 blocks, which should vastly increase the quality of the in-game terrain and let us finish it faster. We’ll keep you posted on how it goes, but we’re working actively to get more tilesets into the game. We’ve been staring at the Industrial one too long!

These are the three main roadblocks to progress on the game, we’re doing our best to bulldoze through them. Over the past month or so, we’ve been spending a lot of time on bugfixes and the like, culminating in the release of Build V8.5, which has proved pretty stable. It’s still got bugs in it, of course, but we’ll be fixing the critical ones and it’s more playable than anything before it. However, our focus is now moving onto adding new features again.

We’re currently working on the (eternally-terrifying) night combat, and we’ll be looking at adding some newer weapons into the game for the next build. The gas grenades (smokes, nerve gas) and C4 explosive charges are pencilled in on the list, and we’ll also be looking at the combat shield and possibly a jet-pack equipped suit of armour. So, yes – you should have some new toys to play with in V9.

So as we head into 2012, I’m pretty confident that things are on track for us to both hit beta and release the game this year. Let’s hope I’m right, eh?

]]>http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/2011/12/the-year-ahead/feed/0November Update & Indie of the Yearhttp://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/2011/12/december-update-indie-of-the-year/
http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/2011/12/december-update-indie-of-the-year/#commentsTue, 06 Dec 2011 14:20:35 +0000http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/?p=759It’s been about six weeks since our launch on Desura and I last posted here. In general, things have been positive at this end. We’ve sold about 750 units since we went live on Desura, so we’re sitting at 2,650 pre-orders or so at the moment. However, the amount we receive per copy sold has fallen drastically since we moved to Desura for several reasons – firstly, we’ve dropped the price $10 with a corresponding fall in revenue. We also only receive 70% or 85% of the revenue of our sales (depending on whether we drive the sales from our site or whether Desura makes the sale themselves) and we’re now obliged to pay VAT. All this has created a situation where we make roughly half as much per copy as we used to, but I think we’ve made the right choice. Though initially more lucrative, Paypal was never going to be the final solution for us.

The big news with Xenonauts is the release of build V8, which is currently on iteration V8.2 (the third iteration). The idea here is that Build V8 will become our long-awaited press preview build when complete, so we’ve been working hard to polish the game up in a similar manner to how we did with Build V7 for the Eurogamer Expo. These little bursts of work are useful because they force us to stop the background system development work and concentrate on improving the actual playability and polish of the game, which is important for the people who have actually paid to pre-order the game and want to play it (which in turn helps us because it encourages community feedback).

We’re currently working on fixing the bugs and improving the stability of the build, which has suffered a little since we implemented Save / Load. V8.3 is due out this weekend and will include fixes for most of the bugs and usability problems reported so far. The major improvements are the addition of the early stages of the research tree, including laser weapons, and the first appearance of a UFO on the battlefield. There are also a LOT of other improvements over V7.5 (the Expo build), but if you want full details it’s best to check the release threads on the forum which are available here for V8.0, V8.1 and V8.2. Build V8.3 is due out this weekend and contains fixes for a lot of the bugs reported, as well as a few smaller updates.

As the name implies, the press preview build will be sent to everyone on our press list as a sort of ‘first preview’ of the game, a proof of concept build to show everybody that we’re a serious project that has all the foundations in place to make something really good. We’ve been doing it with a select few sympathetic magazines already – PC Gamer, Rock Paper Shotgun etc – but this will be the first time we’ll let journalists have a free play of the game. It’s a bit scary, but as long as we’re clear that this is just a proof of concept I think a lot of people will be impressed! Hopefully it’ll translate into a lot more traffic and interest in the game.

We should also mention here the IndieDB have started their annual Indie of The Year competition, and you can vote for Xenonauts here. While there’s no concrete reward for winning the competition given we’re already on Desura, it’s always good to put in a strong showing as it helps raise the profile of the project and doing well in a category increases the likelihood that people who aren’t normally that interested in this particular genre might take a second look at us. It doesn’t take long to vote (just a couple of clicks), so if you guys could help us out with your votes then that would be appreciated.

In terms of the background progress on the game and how the team is faring, there’s a long forum post from a few weeks back that is available here which should fill you in on most of the happenings behind the scenes. In short, things are going rather well. We’ve got a complete list of all work that needs to be done coding wise until the game is feature complete, and I’m working that into milestone builds at the moment to give us a bit more structure. The terrain tiles still remain our biggest timesink but we’re starting to get somewhere with them now.

Finally, the other thing I want to highlight is the Xenonauts Wiki. We implemented this when we launched, but the takeup in it has been pretty poor. This is mostly my fault because I’ve written all of about two articles in it, but I’m going to update it a lot more regularly over the next couple of weeks to make sure that it has most of the core mechanics on it so people can understand how things in the game should be behaving. Because the wiki had been colonised by spambots, I had to spend a few hours exterminating them and now only accounts over 24 hours old can edit or create pages in the wiki. This is a pain, but it’s stopped the spam dead so I’m afraid you’ll just have to live with it. Still, I hope this will turn into a really useful resource for the game so if people think they have time to contribute to the wiki in any way, please do so.

That’s it for now. I imagine you’ll hear more once we get Build V8.x finished and start sending it out to all of the journalists on our press list!

]]>http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/2011/12/december-update-indie-of-the-year/feed/0Desura Researched!http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/2011/10/desura-researched/
http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/2011/10/desura-researched/#commentsWed, 19 Oct 2011 18:02:54 +0000http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/?p=718As some of youmay beaware, we have been having some problems with Paypal. These problems involve them cutting off our only income stream and then freezing the $4,300 in the account for 180 weeks before they return it.

The community has been very helpful during this period, both in terms of the community around the our project and the indie scene as a whole. There have been numerous suggestions about how we could circumvent the Paypal ban on pre-orders, but I was never particularly keen on going back to them. Fundamentally we were always going to struggle with their rules, I think – I was much more interested in finding a solution that was better aligned with where we were going as a project. This gave us two main options – Desura, or the new Humble Indie Bundle store widget.

The HIB store widget was effectively exactly what we had before, but with lower transaction fees and the shield of another (better known) organisation between us and Paypal. Desura, for those who are not aware, is effectively an indie version of Steam owned by the people who run IndieDB/ModDB. I think both would have been good partners, but we decided on Desura because it allows us to outsource the pre-order process (saving me time) and will make it easier to actually deliver the final game when it is released – the plan is Desura or Steam keys for each pre-orderer.

We’re currently working on integrating Desura with vBulletin so pre-orderers can get forum badges for buying the game, but pre-orders should be up again relatively soon, so sit tight. We’re announcing this on this site rather than Xenonauts.com because we’re having problems with that – the frontpage is frozen as it was when the site crashed from the Reddit traffic a couple of weeks back, so we’re migrating over here and will be replacing the current Xenonauts.com with something a bit more snazzy.

All pre-orderers will recieve a Desura key sent to their Paypal email addresses when the Desura pre-orders go live, just as a heads-up.

]]>http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/2011/10/desura-researched/feed/2Website Online!http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/2011/10/website-online/
http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/2011/10/website-online/#commentsWed, 19 Oct 2011 16:54:05 +0000http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/?p=702Hello everyone, and welcome to our new corporate site. This site is intended to become the new community hub for Goldhawk, while the current Xenonauts site is to be replaced with something a bit more slick and streamlined that will market the game a bit better. Why are we doing this? Well, we’ve had a tough couple of weeks where Paypal have pulled the plug on our account and the resulting story going viral sent so much traffic to our site that it crashed and sadly never recovered. Even now we can’t change the front page, which is pretty crippling.

The good news is that this has proved a perfect excuse for us to upgrade our infrastructure, so here’s a list of major improvements over the last site:

Forums:

We’ve upgraded our forums from the creaky integrated Joomla forums we were using to vBulletin, which is far more powerful and a lot easier on the eye.
The forums should now support attachments properly, and we’ve put in a few goodies like forum achievements and autopost of news items to the forums etc.

You’ll also not have to re-register move forums once Xenonauts is released – our future projects will all be based out of this website too.

The pre-orders will now be serviced through Desura, so the forum is no longer segregated into normal people and pre-orderers. Anyone can read the bug reports and pre-order discussions, although they obviously can’t take part until they pre-order!

Blog:

We’ll now have two seperate blogs, one on Xenonauts.com and one here. The Xenonauts one will be much more ‘in character’ and focused on the game than before, whereas the one on this site will be more focused on the team and what we’re up to.

You’ll still be able to track both from this site, though, as we’ll run everything through the front-page news slider and boths news articles will autopost to the ‘Announcements’ section of the forums.

Wiki:

We’ve added an official wiki for Xenonauts on the site, which is the community is free to edit (although we’ll help you get started).

This is intended to preserve the knowledge of the community – previously people would make long forum posts to explain things, but now we can just write a blog post or link to an existing one.

This is going to be particularly valuable for the mappers and modders amongst you, as the game can be quite oblique at first but a couple of wiki posts should get everyone going nicely!

Those are the key improvements over the last site. Our hand was rather forced on this matter thanks to the previous site imploding, but hopefully this new setup should make much easier for us and for you!